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History lesson

  • In this 1954 promotional photo shot at the Sands, we see the gorgeous Copa Girls marking the holidays by stacking themselves in the shape of a Christmas tree. (It helps if you hold the page back a bit from your face and squint a little — there! Starting to look a little like Christmas, right?).
  • You would expect the cards who populate Las Vegas to put their own spin on Halloween, wouldn’t you? Halloween parties have become an important part of the Strip scene in recent years, but Halloween celebrations have been an attraction for visitors for decades, as this Las Vegas News Bureau photo shows, and a key part of Las Vegas life from the community’s beginnings. Soon after the town’s founding in 1905, local groups like the Ladies Aid Society and various society leaders hosted annual Halloween parties as a means of bringing the small population (320 according to the unofficial 1906 census) together.
  • If Las Vegas is eye-popping, luxurious and over the top, it learned from a master with long local ties. Liberace, here with his driver on stage, believed in constantly topping himself.
  • LeRoy Neiman was an Olympic painter — in more ways than one. Sure, he was known for his bold, rapid-fire brushwork that captured the brawn and verve of our most celebrated athlete-gods on the world sports stage.
  • There are as many types of Vegas buffets as there are Vegas casinos. There are the bargain-priced trough parades; there are the globe-spanning carousels with shrines to Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Indian cuisine; there are the foodie pageants offering near-gourmet grub in bulk.
  • Long before big cats were the lifestyle prop of the exuberantly mulleted duo Siegfried & Roy, a tiger was a part of actress Marilyn Maxwell’s Vegas nightclub act. Or it was supposed to be.
  • Oscar Goodman once glibly proposed imploding the Union Plaza to pave a better prospect to what would later become Symphony Park. Today, the former mayor’s name is stamped on a restaurant in the resort that’s now slicking and primping for maximum swank in the New Downtown.
  • The Las Vegas News Bureau and local publicists celebrated Easter with this March 31, 1958 photo, using the Barry Ashton Dancers to remind potential tourists that Las Vegas had — imagine this — beautiful women to see. Donn Arden was and remains the gold standard for the production show, with feather-clad showgirls from the “Lido de Paris” at the Stardust to today’s “Jubilee!” at Bally’s, but others like Frederic Apcar (“Casino de Paris” at the Dunes), Matt Gregory and Ashton, to name a few, contributed to that image of the classic Las Vegas production show.
  • This year, Valentine’s Day means the Mob Museum’s opening and memories of a Chicago mob massacre. But it also means hearts and love.